I have been to a lot of very large conventions in the gaming industry and I’d compare PAX East to the GenCon of the video game market. Although to a tabletop geek like myself, the board gaming, miniature gaming, and role-playing was well represented. I had the opportunity to play a lot of games, observe some games, and add some new games to my games-to-play list.

Games I Played And My Initial Impressions

Disclaimer: I have only played a short convention-style demo for some of the games listed below (unless otherwise mentioned). My opinions are only my first impressions and basic rule sets. Upon playing a full length game, I reserve the right to change my opinion.

D&D Next (Wizards of the Coast): I will admit to being a long-time fan of Dungeons & Dragons since Basic, through AD&D, into 3e and Dungeons & Dragons 3.5. I really wanted to like 4th Edition but was let down by 4e. I’m willing to give this old flame a second chance so I went into D&D Next with an open mind. I played the 2-hour introductory adventure to the system and met five other gamers in the marshaling line that didn’t set me on edge (they were fantastic to play with). So going into the game I had five great people to go through my first D&D Next adventure with and since we were the first game of the day our Dungeon Master had plenty of rest. The stars all aligned to give me a positive first impression of the game. The changes to the rules which resembles many 3.5 mechanics had surprised me by taking a few of the mechanics I really liked in 4th Edition D&D (such as wizard cantrips).

The adventure went smoothly and the pre-generated characters provided a well-rounded experience. The mechanic I liked the most was the advantage & disadvantage rules. The new rules have gotten rid of the big charts of circumstance modifiers, stacked bonuses, range modifiers, and situations that required players to (literally) keep spreadsheets for attack modifiers when rolling dice. If you find yourself attacking an enemy that is unaware of your presence you will have advantage and this allows you to roll 2d20 (two 20-sided dice) and select the highest result. If you find yourself shooting your bow at an enemy at long range, you would be firing at a disadvantage which means you roll 2d20 and select the lowest result. Continue Reading “My PAX East 2013 Tabletop Game Highlight Reel” »

If the Imagine Cup is the World Series of software design, the Kodu challenge is like little league. Broken up into two age groups, students can use Microsoft’s free Kodu platform to learn programming fundamentals in a fun and intuitive environment. And just like the Imagine Cup, Microsoft hosts a competition and prizes for the best games.

Kodu is available for PCs, easy to install and use with support for both XBox game pads or keyboards. The interface is somewhat of a sandbox, where a young developer can paint a world and populate it with characters and environmental objects which can be programmed to react to one another. Program blocks can be arranged to create logical rules that dictate how the denizens of your game interact with the environment and the player. These logic skills are foundational to software design, and teach kids how to think and abstract complex problems in order to program their own game.

As someone who grew up learning to program BASIC by developing my own text adventure games on DOS and Windows 3.1, Kodu appeals to my inner child wanting a simple environment to learn to program. And as a father who wants to provide an easy way for my own kids to get a similar experience, Kodu is incredible. There are a number of visual tutorials on the Microsoft Research FUSE Lab site, and educators can download classroom materials for integrating Kodu into their classes.

Game submissions in to the Kodu Challenge must be in by May 17th. Information about the rules and how to submit can be found on the Kodu Challenge site. Both age groups (9-12 and 13-18) have 1st, 2nd and 3rd place awards of up to $3,000. All types of games are open for submission, with a special emphasis on games that examine water-related issues. This emphasis echoes the Imagine Cup’s continuing focus on world citizenship and is a reflection of the values the Kodu Challenge Parters, MercyCorps and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop bring.

System requirements for the Kodu Game Lab are fairly low, so dust off an old computer and empower your child to explore the fun of game design, and encourage them to submit their game to the Kodu Challenge!

Though the Wii U is still seemingly dealing with next gen growing pains, Nintendo’s handheld dominance has truly continued with the 3DS. After its own rocky start the system has more than come into its own with regard to quality titles. This week three more high-profile releases make their way to this unique portable, and each manages to put a novel spin on an already established concept.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity continues in the tradition of its roguelike predecessors that debuted simultaneously in North America on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance back in 2006. The series convention of human-transformed-into-a-Pokémon-as-protagonist arrives intact on the 3DS, however, the game eschews the traditional personality test that determines your Pokémon form in favor of letting you choose from an initial roster including the popular Unova starters. After picking your avatar and a second monster to serve as your initial AI-controlled partner, you’re quickly thrust into its quirky 3D world. Continue Reading “New on Nintendo 3DS: Mystery, Rhythm and Boos” »

Next Saturday (March 30th) is International Tabletop Day. It is a great time to host your first game night. But how in the world do you find out about great new board games to make your game night work? Here is a short guide I published a while back to help you move beyond Settlers and find great new games.

Somewhere along the way, someone has probably introduced you to the board game version of cocaine, The Settlers of Catan. If the sales figures and stats are to be believed, you got addicted. Without a doubt, Settlers is a modern classic, the Monopoly of today. The game hits the family game sweet spot in almost every way. You can play it over and over again without feeling bored, and it appeals to a wide audience, from children at age 9 to grandparents aged 69.

Settlers is nearly the perfect board game, kind of like Cherry Garcia is nearly the perfect ice cream. But even perfection can lose its luster without variety. One really needs to eat some Chunky Monkey every once in a while to continue to appreciate the bliss that is Cherry Garcia. So what do you buy after you have purchased Settlers? Of course, the next logical step is to buy the Settlers expansions — Seafarers, and Cities and Knights. But what then? Once the Settlers addiction has run its course, sorting through the mass of Euro-style and quality American board games can be confusing.

Quality games aren’t cheap either. It is kind of hard to drop $30 to $100 on a game if you don’t know that it is excellent. So, I want to present three different ways you can learn about new quality board games, followed by a list of surefire hits that will help you move from Settlers into the wider world of board games.

Having covered Skylanders for some time I’ve got a feel for the yearly cycle of new figures, game-play and features. With E3 fast approaching on the horizon what can we expect from Activision’s collectable toy video-game?

As you can see from my Skylanders Giants coverage from last year, E3 is the place when we finally get hands-on not only with the toy figures themselves but also with the videogame. This offers a first critical look at how the game will look in its finished form. Of course this is the first year it has direct competition in the form of Disney Infinity, so the pressure will be on for a good showing.

This year, with Swap Force having a new developer it will be interesting to discover if they can deliver the promised high-definition experience across the platforms — in particular how the Wii version fares. It will also be a chance to assess how the new game zones will function.

Like the Elemental zones in Giants and Spyro’s Adventure, Swap Force will offer certain areas only accessible with a particular type of Skylander. However, this time round there will also be combination Elemental zones where you need two Skylanders of a particular types on the portal to gain access. On top of this we then have the Swap Force zones that are accessible only when you have a certain class of Swap Force character in the game. There are eight different classes, meaning that there will be two Swap Force figures for each.

The next area we should learn more about is how the Swap Force characters will upgrade. We currently understand that both the top and the bottom of each figure can be upgrade separately and have their own upgrade path. The top of the figure is where the health, money and experience resides.

At E3 we should be able to test this theory and discover whether you can re-use the legs from one “dead” Swap Force character with a new head (without re-starting the level). It all sounds a bit involved I know, but it’s this sort of detail that will make all the difference to how the game plays and how much value it offers family gamers.

Skylanders Swap Force

It’s also likely that Activision will unveil the physical figures for more Swap Force characters to go with Magna Charge, Wash Buckler and Blast Zone. It will be interesting to see how their designs look on the portal and how the growing set of figures pans out.

Perhaps more than all this though, my biggest hope is to hear more from the people behind the game. It’s the creativity and approach of these individuals that will determine the overall feel of Skylanders Swap Force, in the same way that I-Wei Huang, Paul Reiche, Paul Yan, Dan Neil, Robert Leyland and the team at Toys for Bob have for the first two games.

I had a chance to go hands-on with the toys from the first Playset expansion for Disney Infinity. Here’s our close-up assessment of Lightning McQueen, Holley Shiftwell, Francesco Bernoulli and Mater in Disney Infinity style.

With all the Skylanders Swap Force news, I’d not kept such a close eye on Disney Infinity of late. Catching up, the first thing to report is that the release date has now changed to August 18th in the US. The official word on the change from Disney is “We have moved the launch date for Disney Infinity to August 18th (23rd in UK) to capitalize on the critical fall retail season.”

While this certainly nudges the game into the more lucrative year-end period, it also pits it alongside Skylanders Swap Force that will likely be making a retail release soon after. It is not inconceivable that Activision could bring their release date forwards so that we really do have a head-to-head battle between to two toy-powered games.

At a recent visit to Disney in London I had a chance to go hands and view the trailers for the characters that will be included in the new Playset. The Cars toys again take on a slightly more stylized form in Disney Infinity, this much I had expected. What was more of a surprise was that they were quite a bit bigger and weightier that the other Disney Infinity characters I’ve held.

Partly because of the nature of a car having more weight and volume that a figure and partly by design, these toy cars feel good to hold. The only down side is that you naturally want to whiz them around the carpet, only here you can’t do that because of the Near Field Communication tech requiring them to sit on a static base. It made me wonder about versions of these toys with detachable bases or perhaps with the electronics buried in the toy itself — I’m sure we will see that before too long.

Now that the teams have been selected, some tickets punched, and others’ dreams crushed, it’s time to start filling in your brackets. No matter if your top team mascot is a Hoosier, Cardinal, Bulldog, Jayhawk, or someone else, fill out a bracket in the GeekDad group. The group is again being run by GeekDad community member Steve Henry, so after you make your picks, why not head over to the community and lay down a little trash talk? But don’t delay — the tournament begins on Tuesday!

It may not look like much, but Guildhall is a clever, engaging game. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu

Overview: It’s the Dark Ages, and you’re itching for progress. So you’ve set up a guildhall to attract professionals — and so has everyone else. Collect enough professionals to complete chapters, which score you victory points! Welcome to Guildhall, a card game released by AEG at Essen this past fall.

Players: 2 to 4

Ages: 12 and up

Playing Time: 30 minutes

Retail: $29.95

Rating: Excellent. Guildhall doesn’t look like much at first glance, but offers some great gameplay.

Who Will Like It? If you’re looking for a quick-playing card game and don’t mind a little bit of backstabbing, Guildhall might suit you just fine.

The stars align for the first system exclusive, franchise free Lego game. Free of its movie responsibilities Lego City Undercover can simply revel in its Lego-ness. The perfect Lego game for families.

There will be many reviews that compare Lego City Undercover to other Lego video-games, and action adventure games in general, and then apply their usual scoring systems. While this is understandable, Lego City Undercover is a game I found myself judging with a more personal yardstick.

In a family setting, it’s hugely sentimental — in a good way I think and much more than the Lego games tied to particular movie franchises. Freed from being overshadowed by heavily freighted intellectual property (with its own limits and benefits) the game connects to the simple joy of Lego kits I remember from when I was young.

Rather than building something for Batman, Luke Skywalker, Indie or Legolas here I found myself wanting to explore, break and build for the sheer joy of those studded little bricks. Lego City Undercover revels in its Lego-ness, rather than the familiarity of a particular movie or super hero.

There’s a good reason why the physical Lego City kits endure longer than movie themed offerings that come and go. Lego City has always been a place to play long term, rather than visit for a particular adventure. So, in my household at least, the steady development of our Lego City’s Fire/Police and Ambulance services, places to live and work as well as all manner of civic services has been the enduring theme of our brick play. Playing Lego City Undercover was like discovering this play-mate in electronic fashion.

This also steers proceedings away from violence and fisticuffs. While there are some police-related encounters that require a degree of force the general tendency here is to arrest and restrain rather than dispatch. Something that fits well with Lego’s peaceful values of “an emphasis on free play and encouraging the imagination, and no modern warfare or violence.”

Now, before I get carried away, the game itself isn’t a million miles from the recent Lego Batman 2 and Lego Lord of the Rings offerings. Although the main city is more fleshed out and larger than the hub worlds we are used to in these games and the various missions are more entwined with the City world, this is still very much a Lego game.

Lego City Undercover Ambulance

However, without a string of franchise characters to labor under TT Games can flex their creative muscle without restraint. This leads to a colorful cast of characters themed around their cops ‘n robbers storyline. As main character Chase, you can don a variety of outfits that grant different abilities and function in different ways.

This absence of a preconceived guiding narrative also uncovers TT Games’ ability for storytelling. We’ve always known they had the skills to tweak an existing tale in comedic and slap-stick directions but here we see them in full force. This really is a very funny game.

The comedy may be a nice-to-have addition for core gamers, but for families it draws in non-players in the room to create more of a shared experience. Like Sesame Street that is programmed to “scaffold” parent-child reactions and interactions, Lego City Undercover works hard to connect on a number of levels.

Cultural references abound, from actor cameos, to film references and in-jokes. Younger players will simply miss many of these, but the grown-ups in the room can enjoy spotted the various references. It’s the sort of thing that adds a touch of class to proceedings and would simply be too hard to get signed off on projects that involved the understandably protective movie franchise holders.

Of course collecting is a big part of any Lego game, and in Lego City Undercover it features more than ever. Not only are there endless “Studs” to grab there are also those all important “Red Bricks”, there are also the new “Super Bricks”. These are used in conjunction with certain “Super Build” sites to let players construct monstrous Lego buildings and vehicles. There’s a touch of Sim City about this as the city slowly takes shape.

Lego Boat Super Build

This being a Lego City world there are numerous ways to get around. My kids have actually spent as long exploring the different vehicles and modes of transport as they have progressing the main story. Here the game works very much like other open world adventures, you can stop any passing car and jump in on the grounds of “police work.”

This again underlined my sentimental familiarity of Lego’s designers. The vehicles in the world are immediately recognizable and tie to various real world Lego kits. Each car, truck or motorcycle handles very differently. Some may find these a little twitchy to control but actually my kids reveled in learning the way each new ride felt to steer.

Another nice little touch here is the Lego City High Speed Chase (60007) kit that includes vehicles and characters from the game. Not only that but it also provides an unlock code to grant access to extra missions and vehicles in the game itself. This led to my kids recreating some of the scenes from the game back in the real world — just like they do in Skylanders Giants. I really like this crossing of the physical-virtual divide.

Lego City Undercover on the Carpet

A favorite pastime of my children was to find the biggest vehicle (most recently an articulated truck) and then race around the city crashing into smaller cars. The game grants larger vehicles more strength and momentum that means it can send other vehicles flying on impact. It’s one of a number of simple mechanics that make the game work as a play-space for younger gamers — and regularly has our kids in hysterics.

The game is controlled by the Wii U controller, which works well although it unexpectedly uses the sticks rather than tilting to steer. This makes the vehicles slightly harder to control for very young players, but ensures the map and information on the controller screen are always visible.

The Wii U controller is also used in a special scanning mode where you hold it up in front of you to look around the world in real space. It’s a simple trick, and one we’ve seen before, but it really does add to the immersion of the game – extending the experience out into the room around you as the player spins on the spot to find hidden characters and Lego bricks.

This may be one reason why the game is only one player — compared to the usual split screen action these Lego games offer. The addition of another Wii U controller is not something that Nintendo have tackled yet, and would add considerable cost to the Lego City Undercover offering.

I do wonder if they couldn’t have included a Wii-Remote powered second player option, even if this was only some kind of assistant mode. My son even had a dream about a two-player version of the game, only to wake up disappointed to discover that was not (currently) a reality. Maybe there is scope for this with the upcoming 3DS version, in a similar way to how Monster Hunter functions on the Wii U.

That said, the nature of the game and combination of TV and controller screen does invite collaboration. Our family of five (and a couple of visiting children for a time) were happily engaged in progressing through Lego City Undercover together. It’s the sort of experience where you want to shout out ideas about where to go next or how to solve a particular problem.

Lego City Undercover Wii U

This play-style also mitigated the biggest short coming of Lego City Undercover for us — the long load times. The game can take a good 30 seconds to load, which I’m sure some will take exception to. Although this was a bit of a pain, my kids seemed to use the time to formulate their plan of attack — or dash off for a toilet break.

Other negatives may be the lack of side quests in the main city as well as an absence of interior locations for many of the buildings. However, this criticism comes more from preconceived ideas about how a Grand Theft Auto style game should function rather than an appreciation of who this game will really appeal to and how they like to play.

The balance is a tricky one, but I think TT Games gets it right. There is a sense of simplicity and accessibility to Lego City Undercover that comes from an intelligent use of restraint. It would have been easy for them to pander to core gamers’ expectation only to over complicate the experience for younger gamers. My 5, 8 and 10 year olds could all play it very happily. It should be noted that it is rated ESRB 10+ for ‘cartoony’ firearms, grabbing and throwing enemies and slamming into vehicles (along with some bathroom humor and flatulence).

As you can tell I’m rather keen on the game. As I see it this could be a real Wii U system seller for families. Add in the prospect of the 3DS version and you have the making of a very special experience indeed.

“Roll to hit” takes on a new meaning in my nephew’s version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Left to his own devices, and left with a huge pile of my dice, this is the D&D variant my nephew Jack came up with. Watch the video below to find out what happens.

The backstory:

The adults were talking boring adult talk, and lacking fun toys for my two nephews, I let them delve into my cache of plastic figurines and old D&D dice. Many of these dice were my originals, dating from the 1970s and 1980s, back when I was little older than Jack.

Jack, my older nephew who was 9 at the time, proceeded to arrange all the dice on one end of my living room floor, and the miniatures at the other. Both groups were arranged in complex formations. My younger nephew Henry (then 5) also created his own designs with the miniatures.

Whatever it’s called, this D&D battle is about to begin. (Image: Ethan Gilsdorf)

I asked Jack what he was up to. He had no idea how to actually play D&D.

All he knew was the game had something to do with dice, minis, orcs and killing stuff.

“This is Dungeons and Dragons,” Jack then offered, spontaneously, with my iPhone camera trained on him. “Well, the new verison.”

He called his new game “Dungeons versus Dragons,” “dice versus mini characters,” “figurines versus dies,” and “flicking die.” (FYI, I later learned that he was saying “flicking die” not another f-word-ing followed by the word “die.”)

Then, Jack began to play. The battle began. OK, it was a pretty rules-lite version, if there were any rules at all. And not a lot of role-playing.

But I applaud his inventiveness and imagination. Give kids some open-ended toys and stuff to play with, and they make up their own games.